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Commentary and Analysis

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of David Pierce. He did some great work at The Verge, and I'm enjoying him even more as the co-host of WIRED's Gadget Lab podcast. But, as the title of this post would suggest, I've a bit of a bone to pick with Mr. Pierce in regards to that podcast's latest outing.

Episode 236 begins with a discussion of the Microsoft-Cyanogen partnership I wrote about last week. A couple of things I heard David say about Android were surprisingly incorrect; I don't expect him to ever read this, but as lots of other people also get this stuff wrong I figured it couldn't hurt to post some unsolicited feedback here.
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I think I missed the part where drawing pictures on your wrist became the smartwatch's killer app...

Yesterday Google announced a major update for the Android Wear platform. Apple needed YouTube to demonstrate the many and varied features of its first smartwatch; the official Google announcement is similarly full of animated GIFs. In other words, Android Wear just got more complicated.
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Yesterday it was widely reported that Microsoft and Cyanogen, Inc. inked a deal that would see a Microsoft app and services stack replace the Google equivalent on future devices powered by Cyanogen OS. In other words, Outlook instead of Gmail, Skype instead of Hangouts, Office instead of Docs and so on. OnePlus One users will surely be furious over this news, but here's something that may surprise you: I really don't have a problem with it.
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Here's a random photo from the Medical Imaging Department at Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital, where my mom had some tests done a week ago today. She turns 90 next month, and her age is catching up with her. This post isn't about her, though—it's about my brother's BlackBerry Classic.

If you live in Canada and aren't happy with either your mobile service or what you're paying for it, my advice is this: Get yourself on Koodo's $55/5GB SK/MB plan as per ijcy's instructions before it's too late.

The likes of Mobile Syrup would have you believe that the coming changes to Koodo (and also Fido) amount to a re-branding for millennials, but forum members know better—the real news here is that loyalty programs and perks are going away.

If reports (from multiple sources) turn out to be true, then subscribers to the Fido network will soon see their Fido Dollars disappear. The 4% pre-tax credit on a customer's monthly bill could be used towards a new device or applied as a discount to an add-on. It was a good differentiator for what was otherwise essentially wireless service from Rogers.

The changes coming to Koodo are two-fold. First, the Koodo Tab, a surprisingly reasonable alternative to the traditional (and egregious) penalties of early contract cancellation, will soon be off the table. Even worse, the 10% BYOD discount will likewise be no more. As someone who refuses, on principle, to lock themselves in to any one carrier via a subsidy, that 10% makes Koodo's $55 plan an even better $49.50/month. To get something similar from parent company TELUS would cost at least twice as much.
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Forget the unifying standard of Apple Pay—or, for that matter, Google Wallet and the forthcoming Android Pay. It looks like we mobile users will soon be spoiled for choice when it comes to paying for things via our smartphones.

The new mobile payment options I'm highlighting today join the growing list of those already discussed—Uber, SmoothPay, Tab Payments, PayPal, ZenBanx, along with the most popular of them all, the near-ubiquitous Starbucks app. If all this weren't enough, there are now at least three more options on the way from the likes of OpenTable, Google and Facebook.
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All I can say is wow, the execs at Cyanogen, Inc. are really blowing their brains out.

Flush with some $80 million in fresh funding from the likes of Qualcomm, Twitter and Rupert Murdoch, Cyanogen's CEO had this to say in a recent interview with Forbes:

We’re putting a bullet through Google’s head.

Uh-huh...

A bombastic statement like this makes for a great headline but honestly, I've seen this sort of thing before. In fact, if you'll indulge me I'll compare Cyanogen with another technology company to give you an idea of where arrogance like this ultimately leads.
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The fandroid in me wants to say: "good for Google". Getting Android Wear on a proper timepiece from an actual watch-maker is an obvious win, and similar partnerships may be in the cards now that the spectre of the Apple Watch has reared its ugly head. Furthermore, I suspect that Android will ultimately prevail in the smartwatch wars, because open, distributed platforms always win.

But all this would ignore an obvious fact: computers and fine jewellery don't really go together all that well. One can last for generations; the other has a shelf life of maybe two years tops.
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You may be somewhat surprised by the rankings of both Canada and the US, but the numbers make sense if you consider the inconsistency of speeds across a relatively large area of service. Hong Kong surprised me too—I would never have guessed that it would rank below Canada. The only explanations I can think of are (1) 3G/TD-SCDMA handsets are more useful for frequent visits to mainland China, and (2) LTE service is lacking because Hong Kongers are too cheap to pay for it.

But the real head-scratcher is Australia's apparent fall from grace, dropping from the number one country with LTE service to 14th overall in only a year. It's important to remember that all of OpenSignal's data comes from the users of their mobile app. In other words, the more of us that sign on, the better that data will be!
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Even before the release of the first-generation iPhone, the tech press—pretty sure it was Gizmodo—started referring to it as the "Jesus Phone". With all the hype I'm reading about today's Spring Forward Event, I don't see why the same divine label can't also apply to Apple's auspicious first foray into the wearables racket.

Since the Apple Watch was announced last September a fair amount of news about it has made its way into the daily round-ups I post to the front page, so in advance of today's proceedings I thought I'd get us all up to speed with a quick check in our collective rear-view mirror.

Of the eight links that follow, Re/code, Tech in Asia and TechRadar are responsible for one each. Two links are from iPhone in Canada and the rest are from iVerge. I'd say that's fairly balanced; hopefully you'll agree.
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With the Samsung Galaxy S6 and HTC M9 officially official, I've been pouring through some other news from Mobile World Congress, happening right now in Barcelona. And as news goes this is pretty big: Cyanogen, Inc. and Qualcomm have inked a deal wherein Cyanogen will provide the software for upcoming Qualcomm Reference Devices.

This does not mean that the Qualcomm equivalent of a Nexus is going on sale anytime soon. Rather than paraphrase I'll let Android Central explain:

Qualcomm makes special devices with each of its chipset launches called Qualcomm Reference Devices, or QRDs. Think of it like a whitebox program, where Qualcomm provides everything necessary for a company to slap its branding on the side and call it their own. There are hundreds of these devices in the world today, made by dozens of different manufacturers. Qualcomm's program makes it so these manufacturers can "make" and sell a device in as little as 60 days, instead of the months and months a from-scratch hardware launch takes. Most of these devices aren't particularly fun to use, due in many cases to the software.

So in other words, a lot of those dreary low and mid-range Android devices are about to get a lot better!
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Yesterday the FCC voted 3-2 in favour of Title II-based net neutrality rules, a decision which has implications for mobile users, members accessing these forums via their home broadband connection... Internet users in general, really, and far beyond the confines of the USA. I've been pouring through the news on this since the vote came down yesterday, and thought I'd share some of the more interesting bits here.

What's Title II Again?

Title II is about the idea of common carriage, first applied to telephone networks in the FCC's Communications Act of 1934, and overhauled with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The idea is pretty simple: a network provider must treat everything on their network equally. The best non-Internet example that I can think of is the explosion of long distance providers here in Canada during the 1990s. And the Internet? Well, you've probably seen this fake ISP ad before.

Verizon's Cheeky Response

As expected, Internet providers in the United States weren't exactly thrilled with the news. Verizon went so far as to post their official response in Morse code... because common carriage is such an antiquated notion, amirite? Anyone?
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I just finished reading this fantastic book by Rod Canion, former CEO of Compaq Computers. I had no idea that Compaq was directly responsible for the rise of PC clones—what the author calls "industry standard" computers—due to their successful reverse-engineering of PC-DOS from the original IBM PC. They were so successful that they ended up licensing their reverse-engineered DOS back to Microsoft, who redistributed it via updates to their own MS-DOS.

In the book's epilogue, Canion turns to smartphones and tablets, crediting Apple with further iterating on the iPod and iTunes Music Store to deliver the first modern smartphone and app ecosystem. No argument there. With regard to Android, however, I was a bit surprised to read this:

Google was trying to create an industry standard much like the PC industry standard, no doubt hoping for the same powerful results.

Last week I caught a thread on reddit wherein a user conducted a survey of the r/Android community in an attempt to figure out the most popular screen size for an Android-powered phone. Though the results could apply to any smartphone the survey was carried out on a subreddit specific to Android, so I should probably follow suit and post this in the Android forum here.

I remember during my first visit to Japan in 2001 wandering through a kitschy shop in Tokyo dumbfounded by what I saw—here in the land of the world's first successful mobile Internet service I was surrounded on all sides by discarded Motorola merch from the 1980s. T-shirts, coffee mugs, Frisbees... all adorned with that instantly-recognizable stylized "M". And this was years before the RAZR ever saw the light of day.

I believe that marketing people call this "brand equity".

So it's probably little wonder that Lenovo, Moto's new owner, would capitalize on that brand equity and offer Motorola handsets in their home market of mainland China. That's the story making the rounds in the tech blogs this week, including GizChina, Android Police and The Verge.

But what if the reverse were true? What if Lenovo smartphones, tuned for LTE data in the Americas, were available for purchase here? Were that the case I might well be the proud owner of a VIBE X2, pictured above.
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Not a fan of the name but I'm really excited about ZenBanx. Here's why:

After having an ING Direct Canada account for many years I finally got serious about it, closing my Scotiabank account and transferring all funds to ING, only to see the former buy up the latter only a few months later. This all went down in 2012; unbenownst to me ING Canada's founder, Arkadi Kuhlmann, started working on a new forward-thinking banking venture right about then. This morning that venture is open for invites in Canada, and it's called (perhaps unfortunately) ZenBanx. Here's the pitch:

Today’s world is mobile; you can jump on a plane and go just about anywhere, but your money can’t follow as easily. ZenBanx will change that.

For someone who really enjoys travelling and really hates fiddling with paper currency, this could be a godsend.
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Last Thursday paywalled tech site The Information hosted an event in San Francisco called Next Phase of Android—no time for definitive articles, we're talking about the future here! Anyway, at this event there was a lot of bluster from Cyanogen, Inc. CEO Kirt McMaster. Seriously, if you believe the headlines that rolled out over the weekend, this is a huge deal:

Maybe it's a good thing Xiaomi doesn't yet offer smartphones tuned for North American LTE networks; the company has a bit of a problem respecting software licenses.

If you're not familiar with the particulars of free software this can get confusing real quick, so let me know if I lose you. Basically, if you thought that all those wonderful custom ROMs available on XDA were massive reverse-engineered hacks you'd be correct in some cases, not so correct in most. Android, if you didn't know, runs on the Linux kernel, and the Linux kernel is governed by a very specific software license called the GPL, or GNU Public License. What's GNU? GNU's Not UNIX—recursive acronym, long story, not really relevant to what we're discussing here...

What is very relevant is the terms of the GPL, which allow for any and all modifications to the Linux kernel (for example) provided that those changes are made public for the benefit of all users. Thus, there's a reason why Android modders tend to gravitate towards Nexus devices and, more recently, the OnePlus One: Google and OnePlus (actually Cyanogen, Inc.) release the source code for their hardware, which ROM makers use to build their firmware, which modders then download and flash. Everybody wins.
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So I'm still sitting on a small pile of really good links that I bookmarked while I was away. Today I'm going to highlight three of those links, wrapping them into my own premise: the growing schism between where the smartphone industry is going and what customers really want.

Ok, that's a massive oversimplification—mobile users are, of course, well-served by some manufacturers, less so by others. Though now a mature industry there's lots of innovation to be had in smartphones, just maybe not where you might think. Have a read and see if you agree.
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